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One year later: How a few businesses have fared since last year's One Spark

Will.Dickey@Jacksonville.com Jeff Charette, founder and CEO of Menuat, helped create the digital menu board at Chamblin's Uptown on Laura Street. Menuat's boards are in about a dozen restaurants.

Bob.Self@jacksonville.com Sylvia Walker took advantage of the exposure she got at last year's One Spark. Her natural skin-care products business, NAIWBE (Natural As I Wanna Be), has a space in The Jacksonville Landing.

Bruce.Lipsky@jacksonville.com The team from Fathom Sphere celebrates their first place in the music category at last year's One Spark.

Last year at this time, Sylvia Walker’s business existed only on the Internet. Now she has customers walking into her brick-and-mortar location. Josh Pierre and Natalie Bogart described one of their goals as a downtown building for the arts. They don’t have that, but they’ve been busy with films, music and other projects. Meanwhile, Jeff and Emily Charette have gone from no sales to about a dozen customers, and they’re actually hiring people.

More than 400 creators brought their projects to One Spark last year. Many left with monetary awards, some much bigger than others. Many simply had people stop by and learn a little about what the creators had created. We look at how three of them have fared in the past year.

Menuat

A year ago, Jeff and Emily Charette had an idea and a product. They had created a digital menu board for restaurants that would sync with all other digital devices.

“We hadn’t even incorporated,” Jeff Charette said. “I’d written the software, we’d put together some hardware. But One Spark was kind of our kickoff.”

So they created a menu for Chamblin’s Uptown, sat in the cafe and waited.

“We talked to 750 people,” he said. “I know because I handed them a flier and talked to them one-on-one. We asked them what they really thought of it and got a ton of validation, along with some suggestions.”

Such as?

“Well, it sounds really small,” he said, “but people like the feel of the chalkboard. So it’s still digital, but it looks more like a chalkboard.”

They started looking around for help from investors and an accelerator. They applied to Techstars in Austin, Texas, and made the top 20 finalists.

“But it wasn’t a good fit,” Charette said.

So they came back to Jacksonville, applied to KYN, the business accelerator funded by Jaguars owner Shad Khan. After that course, they’ve found funding.

Now their menu boards are in about dozen restaurants. They’re talking to larger venues like stadiums and amphitheaters.

“It’s the same software,” he said. “We can do any look and feel.”

Could they have done it without One Spark?

“No way,” he said. “We had a great idea and we knew it, but we had to get out of our comfort zone. It gave a push in the right direction. We needed that thing to say, ‘Here’s the deadline. Now do it.’ ”

Natural As I Wanna Be

Sylvia Walker is a registered nurse who had been selling her natural skin-care products, the ones she makes herself, at outdoor markets, online and two local stores.

She didn’t win much at One Spark, just $634. But the festival gave her something else.

“Branding and exposure,” she said. “It allowed us to get our name out there and have people try our product.”

Her sales went up 50 percent right after the festival.

Three months later, she moved into her own space: Natural As I Wanna Be organic day spa in The Jacksonville Landing.

“That’s where I started, selling outside at their Friday market,” she said. “Talk about a surreal moment.”

She’s still looking for funding to afford the mass production that would put her in position to sell to the major chains. In the meantime, she’s hosting a creator, another startup, in this year’s festival — Geraldine Novy from Tampa, whose project is Healthy Communities.

“Be patient, be passionate about your project,” she said. “Speak from the heart. The people who get it will buy into your brand.”

Fathom Sphere

Pierre and Bogart have an ambitious, if vague, goal for the organization they call Fathom Sphere: “Create an environment that promotes community awareness, self-improvement and artistic expression through collaboration.”

Last year, they took home first prize in the music category and received a check for a little more than $2,500. Not a large sum. Certainly not enough to get them the downtown building they want to turn into a cultural arts center.

But they’ve had a busy year. Using a variety of collaborators, they made a skateboarding documentary using all local music. The University of North Florida hired them for a musical performance.

They’ve been putting on an after-school program in music and arts at the North Florida School of Special Education.

“The greatest thing was all the connections,” Pierre said. “If it wasn’t for One Spark, we wouldn’t have done all that.”

The prize money did allow them to buy a new computer that allowed them to edit the surf film, which premiered at Sun-Ray Cinema.

They have other projects planned, other collaborations. But they aren’t entered in this year’s One Spark.

“We’re just promoting other creators that we want to support,” Pierre said.